FOR STARTERS.

Good Neighbor Samovar

April 16, 1995|By Jeff Lyon.

Every time Mridu Sekhar takes her band of Western health specialists to Russia, something cataclysmic happens. In 1991 the group worked around the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1993, they awoke one Moscow morning to Boris Yeltsin's sending tanks against the Russian parliament.

"Some people think it's us causing these things," says Sekhar, a Chicago physicist, businesswoman and organizer of the Universal Health Conference, which brings American medical expertise to the former U.S.S.R. "I sure hope not," she says, since this year's do, starting April 24 in Kazakhstan, coincides with Bill Clinton's planned summit visit.

As at '93's conference in Uzbekistan, 100 American health pros will coach local M.D.s in such technologies as ultrasound, neonatal resuscitation, facial reconstruction, endoscopy, arthroscopy and dental implantation. The experts, most of them from the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, will also provide counsel on health-care financing.

Highlight: four days of health screening of the local population. Traditional yurtas, or tents, will be devoted to diabetes, asthma, hypertension and dentistry. "We hope to touch 1,000 people," says Sekhar. " It's simple, basic stuff, like showing kids how to brush their teeth, but very exciting."